By pedigree, "Cheri" looks promising: a tale of games of love among jaded French folk written and directed by the fellows behind "Dangerous Liaisons" and starring that film's Michelle Pfeiffer.

But whereas "Liaisons" mixed cruelty, wit, sensuality and drama into a deliciously tart frappe, "Cheri" is pretty, tepid and dull, enlivened only intermittently by drolleries plucked whole from the Colette tales on which it is based.

Pfeiffer plays Lea de Lonval, an aging Parisian courtesan who takes as a lover Cheri (Rupert Friend), the debauched son of another courtesan (Kathy Bates). After some years, the couple are rent by Cheri's marriage. Longingly, Lea schemes to get him back.

Pfeiffer is lovely but uneven, Bates too campy, Friend a cipher. Stephen Frears, so reliably lively, directs here as if in a fog, with stilted staging and editing and no feel for the passionate heat at the heart of the story. It's a complete mystery how he could have signed off on something so enervated and bland.